Levelling up as green industrial policy

The emergence of green industrial policy globally signals a growing awareness of climate action as central to policies that address regional economic disparities. In the UK, the newly elected Labour government’s economic vision of ‘securonomics’ corresponds with such an approach: positioning net zero as a key policy goal and the next terrain of ‘levelling up’ in the UK. Any green industrial policy in the UK will be place-based: with net zero both enabling and complicating how economic policy takes shape in regional and local contexts. This commentary highlights the key spaces in which net zero will take shape across the UK, with different communities experiencing processes of deindustrialisation or reindustrialisation as sectors decline and emerge. In advocating for a place-sensitive green industrial policy, it details how green jobs and skills will play a key role in any future just transition. With the regional geographies of net zero already taking shape, it highlights that climate action will be linked to patterns of emergence, change and decline that inscribe regional economies with new vulnerabilities, tensions and futures.